Joyce and Svevo in Trieste

There they are, Trieste's two most original literary chroniclers, among the many statues in the public gardens described by Svevo (born Ettore Schmitz, a typical Triestine mix - the nom de plume marries Italian and Swabian roots) as 'that greenery which seems so pure in the midst of the grayness of the streets and houses that surrounds it'.

I confess that this will be a very patchy entry, as I hardly trailed around the Joyce sites in Trieste much more than I did the ones in Dublin (in that instance, not at all). And I'm only halfway through Svevo's putative masterpiece, Zeno's Conscience, which so far has disappointingly little about the city in which it's set, though it does make me laugh from time to time.

Still, we'd just come back from the Julian Alps and Udine in time for Bloomsday, 16 June. There was a happening of sorts starting at the Urban Hotel Design, somewhat chaotic as these Italian esposizioni usually are. In a very crowded room, a man in a straw hat clowned around a bit on a whistlestop reading of Ulysses with musical interludes. We were shown films of the four artists involved in the 'projetto', one of whom made fun of picking up Ulysses, putting it down and declaring that Joyce could go hang; Svevo was the man for him (the two are not unconnected: Joyce saw Svevo into print and is even supposed to have modelled Leopold Bloom on his Triestine drinking buddy). Here are a couple of Luigi Tolotti's digitally elaborated collages.



Then we went walkabout, up to the street with the Augustan arch, but it had all fizzled a bit and so the two of us branched off and headed back for the harbour.


Joyce lived with Nora Barnacle in no less than nine poky apartments in the vicinity as a struggling writer and Berlitz School English teacher, fascinated by the Triestine dialect and the red-light district, both of which are supposed to have found their way into Ulysses - a book with a double consciousness split between Trieste and Dublin. He also spent hours absorbing the Greek orthodox liturgies in the Church of San Nicolo dei Greci.


It was brilliantly illuminated by the late afternoon sun when we visited, especially when the west door swung open. The young sacristan was very welcoming, and told us how large a community it still hosted on a Sunday morning.


We spent one of our four nights at the James Joyce Hotel in the old city - quiet, clean, rather dark and not bad value for money. Of course I have to show you the toiletries.


Even so, for our last night we returned to the hotel recommended by blogging pal Willym, Le Corderie, high on the hill and quite a hike from the centre of town (though weaving up and down through the backstreets, we caught some marvellous art nouveau). Le Corderie is modern, filled with books in every room, and boasting two especially delightful members of staff in the incredibly vivacious Edwiga and the very nice girl who served us breakfast on the terrace and gave us extra helpings of cherries. And what a breakfast it was - our new friends certainly weren't wrong about that.


But how have I got from high literature to food? I can't say that Svevo's Zeno would have especially approved - the idle, neurasthenic and hypochondriacal merchant's son is much more interested in cigarettes.

Trieste: not quite nowhere

You probably guessed my unadvertised absence as time out of the musical world, and where better to take it than the ideal city of Trieste, excurting north to the Julian Alps for a few days' contrast? I've dreamed of going to this chimerical place since reading Jan Morris's very personal notion of it in Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere.


She means 'nowhere' in a positive sense: the real nowhere people, she writes, form a fourth-world diaspora that transcends race, age, nationality and sex:

They share with each other, across all the nations, common values of humour and understanding. When you are among them you know you will not be mocked or resented...They laugh easily. They are easily grateful. They are never mean. They are not inhibited by fashion, public opinion or political correctness. They are exiles in their own communities, because they are always in a minority, but they form a majority nation, if only they knew it. It is the nation of nowhere, and I have come to think of its natural capital as Trieste.

Why? Partly because of the city's geographical position, on a narrow coastal strip in the north-easternmost corner of Italy, 'closely enveloped by Slav territories' (the Slovenian border is five miles away). Its biggest wave of development came when Maria Theresa developed it as the Austrian empire's port, but crucially a free one, not a military station. To the Austrians we owe the layout of the grid plan at the base of the rock on which the old Duomo and castle sit. Trieste isn't rich in art and architecture like nearby Venice or even smaller cities like Padua or Mantua, but it's a wonderful base and sits on a wide, sweeping bay beneath the limestone rockfaces of the intriguing Karst.


Take the train westwards for half an hour and you hit the flatlands and the lagoons, but here you're enveloped by natural beauty and wildness.

Great art has been made here: Joyce devised much of Ulysses and wrote A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as well as the play Dubliners in dark corners of the old town; Rilke penned his groundbreaking Duino Elegies at a castle just along the coast; the Victorian Richard Burton finished his Arabian Nights in a tavern on the hill and would have strolled along the so-called 'Napoleonic way' on the karst to see something like this view (if less developed).


Italo Svevo celebrated Triestinism in a novel I've yet to read, and must find out if it's available in translation. Verdi had I Due Foscari and Stiffelio premiered in the still-handsome opera house (we missed Otello and a concert conducted by the great Nello Santi by a matter of days); Mahler came to conduct and found the people 'terribly nice'.

Alas, so much to store up and write about - I'll do the Joyce Bloomsday report in a while, and I want to cover temples of various sorts, too. Let's start, though, with some photoimpressions from the Molo Audace, which seems to me as perfect an epitome of Trieste multi-culturalness as anywhere. Old ladies walked their dogs and played with their grandchildren; Slovene and Croatian amateur fisherman dangled their rods and their pot belles over the jetty; the odd tourist (there aren't so many here), a group of Spanish students and businessmen on their mobile phones from the nearby conference in the converted fish market came and went. At 7pm, the sun hit the buildings on the harbour and I did a 360 degree fillum, since my camera permits it - starting with the Piazza Grande - since patriotically reclaimed by the Italians as the Piazza dell'Unita d'Italia - with its grand Hapsburgian piles of commercial and civic authority, wheeling along the harbour front to the Greek church where Joyce spent many a happy hour and then out to sea, across to the 1930s lighthouse and back to base. It seems better to do it in stills, though. The Piazza from the Molo with the old town rising behind it:


Moving along the shoreline to the Greek church flanked by a couple of palaces:


Round to the ?1930s? Capitaneria di Porto:


Out to sea:


A Triestine dame reflects against the backdrop of the working harbour:


It was a strange sensation, comparing my first reading of Morris's book when her writing conjured up mirages, with a second undertaken at leisure in the place itself and tallied with my own impressions. It was hard to find any melancholy in Trieste as the first heatwave hit Italy and we basked in temperatures of 30 degrees or sought out shady retreats (and there are plenty in this city). All I know is that I'd happily settle here for six months or so, and if I didn't produce a Ulysses, at least I reckon it would be conducive to good creative work. And now, back to the grindstone: got a heavy workload this week, and apologise for absence, but I don't think it pays to advertise awayness to the world.